The Mirror in the Ground: Archaeology, Photography and the Making of a Disciplinary Archive by Nick Shepherd

Shepherd, N (2015). The Mirror in the Ground: Archaeology, photography and the making of a disciplinary archive. Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers and the Centre for Curating the Archive.

JM Coetzee, winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature, comments: “Human archaeology in southern Africa has since its beginnings been implicated in the projects of evolutionism and biological racism. Nick Shepherd’s delvings into the underground of the discipline are part of an honourable effort to save archaeology from its past, an effort that starts with recognizing dig sites for what they have always been: the sacred ground of the dispossessed. The Mirror in the Ground offers us a fresh way of looking at the photographic archive, with a commentary as moving and compassionate as it is unsettling” (April 2014).